Psychiatric care was the most influential (and free) course I took during my two years at CalArts. Therapy enabled a confrontation with vulnerability for me in ways that art could not. Admitting to a secret personal language, complete with the code of one’s own history, sometimes gets blanketed under the heavy-handed wraps of jargon, while easier-to-swallow categorizations place the work in the comfortable context that “professionals” have provided for us. The vacuum is nearly impossible to punch a hole in, so art begets art, art talks about art, art critiques art. Paths

Nowadays, make-believe is as prevalent in politics and everyday life as in art. The current expansion of theater into politics and the blurring of fiction and reality can be viewed as a deceptive mechanism of the nation-state. I use flags in my paintings like the politician/magician’s prop, intended to mesmerize crowds lured by their mythical charm. The compositional arrangement of flags in my works obscures their reading. Disarrayed, stretched, floating, or hiding other objects, they exist in a fictional space whose logic is unclear to the viewer. Whether an aid for a spellcaster

The emotional and moral issues that surround the images depicted in these paintings concern loss and death. Combining the languages of representation and abstraction, I bring texture to the depictive and affective aspects of an image. I use a variety of techniques and materials to investigate charged subjects and prompt a sense of the fragility of human existence.

My work addresses the ancient history and mythology of West Africa. The characters I present are fictional propositions inspired by what existed in the past. I am interested in the venerable traditions, philosophies, and aesthetics that still permeate and inform African culture today. I find it important to highlight the rich color and substance of ancient West African kingdoms that both dwarfed and predated the Greek and Roman empires. I consider the body as a site for cultural expression and symbolism, and I am drawn to the expansive histories surrounding figuration.

Michele Abramowitz works on both sides of an unprimed surface to distort spatial relationships in the picture plane, highlighting the indivisibility of material and image in painting. In other words, her figures exist, and can only exist, because of the permeability of the surface. Furthermore, her figures are contorted to fit the painting—defined and confined by its edges. Abramowitz does not depict worlds the viewer looks into, but rather (secularly) transubstantiates the medium’s material of paint, surface, and support into figures. By integrating the figures into the painted

I make art that reflects our current time and American culture. I both hold up a mirror to society and reflect my role within it. My work illustrates aspects of toxic whiteness and masculinity that I find pertinent to today’s problems. I feel it is my responsibility, as a white heterosexual American male, to critique and reject such identities. I often think of medieval jesters who through humor and entertainment could push sociopolitical agendas onto the ruling class, sometimes successfully. I try to reclaim the power of those medieval jesters through my process

For the past few years I have been collecting oral histories, memories, and imagery as a way of searching for connectivity. This set of recent paintings reference my firsthand experience of immigrating as well as my family’s long and complicated history with displacement. The paintings were put together much like a game of telephone, transmitted through generations, stretched and skewed by family members and friends, rendering them fragmented but crystallized.

My work investigates the horizon as a transitional proscenium of utopia. A place where nothing ever happens, an aspirational space. As humans we try to explain why we exist. My own thoughts of “Why?” were first informed by childhood night terrors. Though the terrors have stopped, their sensation lingers, leaving me with a creeping suspicion that nothing is real.

We understand space—first shallow, then distant—through touch. We rely on the correlation of what something feels like and what it looks like. The process of painting is the same, but more mysterious and basic.